Fea­tures

What ex­tras do you get for your money?

Al­though we’re de­lib­er­ately fo­cus­ing on drives that are sim­ple hard disks, it doesn’t hurt if they come with some ex­tras. Hap­pily, all at least come with a USB 3.0 ca­ble in the box, and, in the case of the drives that have mul­ti­ple in­ter­faces, you usu­ally get ca­bles for them too. The G|RAID comes with a FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 ca­ble that lets it con­nect to Macs with ports that use the orig­i­nal im­ple­men­ta­tion of FireWire, and ku­dos to La­Cie for bundling a Thun­der­bolt ca­ble with the 2big Thun­der­bolt 2 as well as a USB 3.0 one; they’re pricey.

All, ex­cept the drive from G-Tech­nol­ogy, come with bun­dled soft­ware, but it’s a mixed bag. With the La­Cie drives you get In­tego Backup Man­ager Pro; de­cent soft­ware, but we’d un­der­stand if you stayed with Time Ma­chine. The Sea­gate backs up iPhone pho­tos when on the same net­work and can scrape Flickr and Face­book pho­tos – al­though, for the lat­ter it stores them in your Home folder. Other­wise, it’s just con­fig­u­ra­tion dash­boards.